Translation and literary History An Indian View by Ganesh Devi is an article which is presented in presentation.

1. Presented by

2. KeyArguments

3. ABSTRACT
• ‘Translation is the wandering existence of a
text in a perpetual exile’ -J. Hillis Miller
• Western metaphysics translation is an exile,
a fall from the origin
• Mythical exile - metaphorical translation
• Translations are not accorded the same
status as original work.
• Guilt of translation

4. • Strong sense of individuality - Systematic
philosophy & logic of social history makes them
view translation as an intrusion of 'the other'.
• The intrusion is desirable to the extent that it
helps define one's own identity.
• Philosophy of individualism & Metaphysics of
guilt, renders European literary historiography
incapable of grasping the origins of literary
traditions.

5. RoleofTranslation
• Translation of Bible – Revolutionary event in the history of
English Style.
• Chaucer’s ‘Canterbury Tales’ – Translating Style of
Boccaccio.
• Dryden & Pope used the tool of translation to recover a
sense of order.
• Role of translation during last two century.
• Indian English Literature – Indological activity of
translation during late 18th & 19th century.

6. • Since translations are perceived as unoriginal, not much thought
has been devoted to aesthetics of translation.
• Issues relating ‘Form’ and ‘Meaning’ haven’t been settled in
relation to translation.
• Do they belong to the history of the ‘T’ language or ‘S’ language?
• Do they form an independent tradition all by themselves?
• This haphazard activity devotes too much energy discussing
problems of conveying the original meaning in the altered
structure.

7. Roman Jakobson in his essay on the linguistics of translation
proposed threefold classification of translations.
1. Those from one verbal order to another verbal order within
the same language system,
2. Those from one language system to another language
system,
3. Those from a verbal order to another system of signs.

8. • He asserts that poetry is untranslatable.
• He maintains that only a ‘creative translation’ is possible.
• Every act of creation as a completely unique event.
• In order to explain linguistic change, historical linguistics
employs the concept of semantic differentiation as well as that
of phonetic glides.
• If synonymy within one language is near impossibility, it is not so
when we consider two related languages together.

9. • Structural Linguistics - Language as a system of signs,
arbitrarily developed.
• Language is an open system. It keeps admitting new signs as
well as new significance in its fold.
• Do such systems become a single open and extended
system?
• If translation is defined as some kind of communication of
significance, and if we accept the structuralist principle that
communication becomes possible because of the nature of
signs and their entire system, it follows that translation is a
merger of sign systems.

10. • Such a merger is possible because systems of signs are open
and vulnerable.
• Translating Consciousness
• The concept of a ‘translating consciousness’ and
communities of people possessing it are no mere notions.
• In most Third World countries, where a dominating colonial
language has acquired a privileged place, such communities
do exist.

11. • In India, several languages are simultaneously used by language
communities as if these languages formed a continuous spectrum of
signs and significance. The use of two or more different languages in
translation activity cannot be understood properly through studies
of foreign-language acquisition.
• In Chomsky's linguistics the concept of semantic universals plays an
important role. However, his level of abstraction marks the farthest
limits to which the monolingual Saussurean linguistic materialism
can be stretched.

12. • ‘Translation is an operation performed on languages: a process of
substituting a text in one language for a text in another; clearly,
then, any theory of translation must draw upon a theory of language
– a general linguistic theory’.
• During the nineteenth century, Europe had distributed various
fields of humanistic knowledge into a threefold hierarchy:
comparative studies for Europe, Orientalism for the Orient, and
anthropology for the rest of the world.
• Comparative literature implies that between two related languages
there are areas of significance that are shared, just as there may be
areas of significance that can never be shared.

13. • Translation can be seen as an attempt to bring a given language
system in its entirety as close as possible to the areas of
significance that it shares with another given language or
languages.
• All translations operate within this shared area of significance.
Such a notion may help us distinguish synonymy within one
language and the shared significance between two related
languages.
• Literary translation is not just a replication of a text in another
verbal system of signs. It is a
• replication of an ordered sub-system of signs within a given
language in another corresponding ordered sub-system of
signs within a related language.

14. • The problems in translation study
• The relationship between origins and sequentiality.
• Origin has not been tackled satisfactorily.
• The question of origins of literary traditions will have to be
viewed differently by literary communities with ‘translating
consciousness’.

15. • Let us allude to Indian metaphysics in conclusion. When the
soul passes from one body to another, it does not lose any
of its essential significance. Indian philosophies of the
relationship between form and essence, structure and
significance are guided by this metaphysics.
• Indian literary theory does not lay undue emphasis on
originality. If originality were made a criterion of literary
excellence, a majority of Indian classics would fail the test.
The true test is the writer’s capacity to transform, to
translate, to restate, to revitalize the original. And in that
sense Indian literary traditions are essentially traditions of
translation.
Conclusion :